filled with dark amber liqueur, and they sipped at it as they looked around them. Their furniture looked as if it had elbows, it was so angular, and on the wall above the couch was what Maggie was sure must be modern art, a soaring splash of fuschia dotted with black and gray. It was pretty, really, and the gray matched the couch. The man rose and Maggie leapt back, her heart pounding, but when she looked in again she could see that he was only adjusting the picture, and she imagined they had just hung it, hung it before they unpacked any of the cardboard boxes stacked at the far end of the room, before they began putting away their dishes and discovering names written in pencil inside their brand-new cabinet doors.
The woman rose and stared at the picture, a hand on her hip, and then she said something to the man and stood tapping her foot while he made the smallest adjustment. A voice in Maggie’s head said stridently, “I’d bet my bottom dollar they’re Jews,” even though Maggie herself was thinking that they looked mostly Italian, and Maggie recognized it as her grandfather’s voice. And she knew that for the rest of her life, from time to time she would hear that voice within her head.
She wondered if this was what it was like to be haunted. Or perhaps that was what heaven was, the eternal life of your own point of view fired off, every now and then, inside the skulls of unsuspecting friends and relatives. Maggie thought that her grandfather would live that way in her mind, until the day when she died herself, when there would be other people around to remember her. She looked back at the houses of Kenwood, old and familiar, and she looked around her at Tennyson Acres, and the two seemed to her to be the past and the future. She heard her grandfather’s voice again, saying, “There’s the here, and then there’s the hereafter.” That was how it looked to her, the two parts of the neighborhood, like here and hereafter, like what had been and what was to come. Her grandfather was finally having his hereafter, but he was here, too, inside her head, and she was glad of that.
It wasn’t only the dead that lived with you that way. When she closed her eyes she could hear Helen say “Not to decide is to decide,” and her mother saying, with a great throb in her quiet voice, “Not good or bad. Things just are.” She knew that twenty years from now she would still hear all those voices in her head, and she knew that as long as they stayed there she would be able to do all the things she had to do, to make all the choices she had to make. But yesterday, as she had walked down the aisle, looking into the curled heart of the pink rose at the center of her bouquet, she had heard another voice, telling her to lift her chin, to keep her shoulders square, to walk slowly. And suddenly it had come to her, as she was dancing with her father, the stars of darkness exploding inside her closed lids, that the voice she was hearing was her own, for the first time in her life.
OBJECT LESSONS
A Reader’s Guide
ANNA QUINDLEN
A CONVERSATION WITH ANNA QUINDLEN
Jennifer Morgan Gray is a writer and editor who lives in New York City.
Jennifer Morgan Gray: Was there a particular image or idea that inspired you to write Object Lessons? Did you begin with a vision of a particular character, a plot occurrence, both, or neither?
Anna Quindlen: Object Lessons is my most autobiographical novel—like Maggie Scanlan, I am the daughter of an Irish father and an Italian mother—and so the motivating principle was more overarching than it has been in subsequent books, when I’ve often begun with a single character, image, or theme. But I would say that my initial impulse had a good deal to do with the construction of the second-stage suburbs during the 1960s. As much as the counterculture, that sprawl of split-levels and ranch houses changed America and how Americans saw themselves. And it was a metaphor, I think, for taking a good, hard look at the old ways and mores. That’s an important theme of the book.
JMG: Was there a mood you hoped to evoke by calling the novel Object Lessons? Were there any other titles you considered and